Page 18 - Occupational Health & Safety, October 2017

CHEMICAL SAFETY TRAINING
Five Necessary Components of a Successful Company-wide Crisis Drill
Corporate-level crisis planning should become an integral part of your chemical training program—and the formula for creating an effective cross-company drill.
BY CATHERINE MAXEY
jor threat to a company, its personnel, their ability to provide products and services to customers or sup- pliers, and their reputation. Simulating a chemical or business crisis through an organization-wide drill is the best way to ensure you have a plan in place and that leadership and employees are prepared to take proper action should a crisis of a severe magnitude occur.
The following five elements are essential to elevat- ing your company’s or organization’s standard emer- gency response process to a major crisis drill.
Generally speaking, a well-structured and consistently updated corporate crisis plan should be provided to plant leadership once a year.
1. Plan Ahead
Because a real crisis always happens when least ex- pected, part of what makes a crisis drill so effective is that it is a surprise to the majority of the workforce when it happens. This element of surprise empowers employees to put their crisis preparedness training into practice during a realistic scenario. Therefore, to ensure all parties are able to mobilize appropriately, it’s important to define various crisis levels and what they entail ahead of time. Employees will probably not have time to consult the company crisis management handbook during an actual emergency, so providing hard copies of this plan well in advance—and making sure employees are well versed in the practices out- lined in the handbook as part of your ongoing train- ing—can mitigate confusion during a drill.
Generally speaking, a well-structured and consis- tently updated corporate crisis plan should be provid- ed to plant leadership once a year. While it’s important to make electronic copies available, we have found that delivering hard copies tends to garner higher readership among employees.
A well-structured crisis plan has multiple compo- nents that are integral to its success. First, everyone’s roles and responsibilities should be clearly delineated. This includes alternate roles in the event the desig- nated employees are unavailable or unable to perform their assigned duties. The various phases of the crisis management plan also should be clearly explained so that accidents are accurately categorized.
An effective plan should begin with notifying the proper channels of an initial incident so that the situa- tion can be assessed and an appropriate crisis level can be determined. Standard crisis levels might range from one to three; with level one being a local emergency that can be handled by a site’s on-duty personnel, to a level three, in which case the crisis poses significant liability, legal, reputational, and financial threats to
Emergencies don’t discriminate. They can hap- pen to the smallest of companies or the larg- est of manufacturers. Every organization has the responsibility to be prepared to respond
properly to any emergency or crisis that may arise. To safeguard against potential catastrophes, crisis drills are designed to address the immediate situation, re- turn the company to productivity as quickly as pos- sible, and identify areas of improvement to prevent future occurrences.
An effective corporate crisis drill is an opportunity to put into practice all of the elements of a company’s environmental, health and safety (EH&S) program— and link them to business processes and corporate priorities.
Most companies perform local emergency drills at individual sites, but it’s less common for organiza- tions to practice crisis response at a larger national, or even global, scale. While employee preparation at the plant level in the event of a crisis is key, it’s important to prepare managers across the company to involve stakeholders beyond the local plant and to know how to identify and handle crises that can escalate quickly.
A corporate-level crisis, broadly speaking, is a ma-
18 Occupational Health & Safety | OCTOBER 2017
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